It's Been a Soft Year for Hard Rock

As per tradition, let me open this discussion with my own personal
top 30 for 1975, arrived at with more travail than seems healthy to
me.

Bob Dylan/The Band: The Basement Tapes 24

Neil Young: Tonight's the Night 11

Steely Dan: Katy Lied 10

James Talley: Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, But We Sure Got a Lot of Love 10

Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks 10

Toots and the Maytals: Funky Kingston 8

Elton John: Rock of the Westies 8

Bob Marley and the Wailers: Natty Dread 8

Patti Smith: Horses 6

Bonnie Raitt: Home Plate 5

Roxy Music: Siren

Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Nuthin' Fancy

Neil Young: Zuma

Eno: Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)

The Band: Northern Lights--Southern Cross

Fleetwood Mac

Amazing Rhythm Aces: Stacked Deck

Gary Stewart: Out of Hand

Manfred Mann's Earth Band: Nightingales & Bombers

Terry Garthwaite: Terry

Loudon Wainwright III: Unrequited

John Prine: Common Sense

Randall Bramblett: The Other Mile

K.C. and the Sunshine Band

Shirley and Company: Shame Shame Shame

Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here

Al Green: Al Green Is Love

The Meters: Cissy Strut

Leon Redbone: On the Track

A lot of my colleagues are feeling beamish with power these days:
this has been a good year for rock and roll, they tell me, burping
contendedly after trying to fit 13 records onto their 10-place ballot
for this year's Pazz & Jop Critics Poll. I disagree, and I think
Pazz & Jop illustrates why. Look carefully at the results for a
moment: I did not choose the figure 13 arbitrarily. Roughly speaking,
that is where the critical consensus stops short. Not that any of the
38 participating critics chose from precisely those 13 records on
which the consensus arrived. But those were the possibilities that
dominated our collective mind; with the inevitable exceptions
(especially vehement on Patti Smith, who is not much appreciated
outside of New York, at least not yet; more weary and widespread on
Roxy Music, who understandably leave many listeners cold, and the Who,
whom even admirers of the present LP suspect of moribundity) people
who apply aesthetic standards to "rock" agree that all 13 are "good
records" of one sort or another.

In contrast, consider the next three finishers. Paul Simon's
staunchest fans will admit that Still Crazy represents a
slip--the controversy is over how big a slip. Red Headed
Stranger is a cosmic cowboy cult record. And while Fleetwood
Mac is very, very pleasant, as my own list attests, it most
certainly garnered its votes as "good listening" rather than "good
art."

Since rock criticism is determinedly hedonistic, that distinction
still doesn't go down with some participants, who insist that what
they listen to is identical to what is good. Lester Bangs voted for
The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! and Metal Machine Music
because the played them more than he did Blood on the Tracks;
Vince Aletti omitted Al Green Is Love because he filed it away
after admiring it a few times. But more than ever the results
represent a kind of balance. What mattered was not only what we'd been
playing, but also how much a record had to give when it did reach our
turntables.

Which brings us back to the lucky 13. Look at the titles again--a
rather limited selection, wouldn't you say? Two each from Bob Dylan
(numero uno), Roxy Music (critic's band), and Neil Young (genuine
comeback, hooray). An album by numero uno's band. Old faves the Who,
new faves Steely Dan. Token blackness from two of the three
single-artist reggae LPs released in America in 1975, one of them a
compilation stretching back more than half a decade for its
goodies. And two critic's records, one an enormous--frightening, I'd
say-- commercial success, the other as yet unproved among people in
general. Charley Walters--who voted for Diamond Head, by Roxy
Music guitarist Phil Manzanera--looks over his list and experiences
some disquiet: "It makes me feel as though I spent the entire year
listening to Dylan and Roxy."

In 1974, the top 13 were not so sharply demarcated from what came
below, and there were really 13 of them: Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan,
Randy Newman, Stevie Wonder, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Band,
Roxy Music, Jackson Browne, Eric Clapton, New York Dolls, Linda
Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, the Raspberries.

Admittedly, part of this year's narrowness reflects nonoutput by
Newman, Wonder, the Stones, and Browne, all of whom will be back. But
it also reflects the death of Parsons and the break-up of the Dolls
(now semi-reunited and looking for a contract) and the Raspberries (a
fluke anyway, I suppose--leader Eric Carmen's solo album of this year
received just one mention). And it reminds us of how badly Joni
Mitchell (two mentions), Linda Ronstadt (also two mentions, albeit
such enthusiastic ones that she placed number 26), and Eric Clapton
(one mention for his studio LP, two for his live) let us down this
year. Two fine LPs from Neil Young don't quite compensate for all of
that.

Of course, I could be reading too much into this. A certain ebb and
flow is to be expected, and I have no doubt that some of the artists
who were disappointments in 1975 will surprise me pleasantly in 1976
or 1979. But there's more reason for my gloom; you can find it in the
point values I assigned in my own Pazz & Jop ballot: The
Basement Tapes 24, Tonight's the Night
11, . .. . There were 12 albums vying for my top 10,
but only one of them had the earmark of greatness--the same album that
also dominated the Pazz & Jop consensus by a wide margin. This
album was never intended to be an album at all, which is fine with
me--I'm not much of a studiolator myself. But it has to be just a
little depressing to people that the accident occurred in 1967.

I made the counterargument myself when the set appeared last
summer: it would have been the best of 1967, too. I think so. But it
is significant how utterly The Basement Tapes dwarfs even the
most courageous music to come out of this year, this
time. Tonight's the Night and Horses--both
uncompromising records--sound puny and desperate in comparison. They
lack the utopian edge, that hint of cultural possibility, that gives
the realism of The Basement Tapes its agreeably wry
flavor. Realism is narrower now, more personal, and so 1975 produced
13 "good records" by 10 artists plus a lot of (often excellent but
nevertheless) personalized taste.

This fact embarrasses critics a little, I think--Jerry Leichtling
told me he omitted The Basement Tapes to make his list more
contemporary, and others commented that they didn't want to list two
records by one artist. Which is to say, the consensus could have been
even broader. As I compiled it was not clear for a while which of the
top four would pull ahead. I was surprised and gratified by Patti
Smith's strong showing (which came almost entirely from New York in
what is purposely a New York-dominated poll--a late vote from Larry
Rohter of the Washington Post would have put Springsteen back in
second) and slightly embarrassed by Springsteen's. But I was worried
by both, because the two records seem to me to typify the inevitable
insularity of criticism.

Taking a lead from MIT prof and former Rolling Stone reviewer
Langdon Winner, who came out of semi-retirement in the Real Paper to
point out that Born to Run represents the formalization of all
rock's rebel precepts, I have to believe that neither Springsteen's
sense of history nor his saving vulgarity contributes as much to his
popularity as the subliminal promise of aesthetic safety he
offers. And while the acceptance of Patti Smith signifies the
receptivity of rock's critical establishment to music that is
genuinely avant-garde in roots and intent, that does not obliterate
two objections: one, that Smith's avant-gardism is second-hand,
semi-realized, or both--I'm not convinced that many of the critics who
like her work are qualified to judge how vanguard it really is; and
two, that the popular appeal of Smith's music maybe limited to those
who want to think of themselves as avant-garde, critics included. I'm
not saying I believe this myself; I don't think I do. But the
possibility remains, and I think it's much too early to declare
Horses any kind of masterpiece. The victory of The Basement
Tapes represents the bitter truth about a year that was equivocal
at best: I'll always settle for that.

This was a bad year for black music, especially on albums; if I'd
contacted more critics specializing in black music--next year I
will--I'm sure the Harold Melvin album would have done even better,
but after that it's Earth, Wind & Fire, the equivalent of
Fleetwood Mac. It was also an excellent year for country music, with
four albums making the top 30 as opposed to one last year. In the case
of each fringe I think this is largely a matter of care in making the
albums inconsistent at best, while country artists are just beginning
to catch on to the great Sgt. Pepper/Otis Redding
album-as-work-of-art tradition.

Pazz & Jop expanded this year; due to my own bad organization,
I didn't reach as many critics as I would have liked. Critics who
don't know a lot of other critics are the best corrective to critical
cliquishness, though a certain penchant for the obvious does tend to
result as well. Last year 24, this year 38, next year 52? And maybe
someone named Brenda to help me with the tabulations.